CAVALRY IN THE DISTANCE
Notes from Dad’s psychiatrist, Dr. Martin, July 26, 1965
Psychotherapy has continued, however little progress has been made. The focus has tended to remain on the marital conflict and we have made little progress in terms of therapy. The situation has reached the point that he can no longer really function effectively in his work and arrangements have been made for a referral to the Institute of Living in Hartford, Connecticut.
It would take nearly another month, and another bottom to fall out, before Dad agreed to go.
Memory: I Am “Lonely Guy”
The coolest kids in the neighborhood have circled their bikes in the quiet sun of the Saturday playgrounds at Bamber Valley School. This is the Elite – the coolest of the cool kids – and handsome 9-year-old Steve Carter is there in its center. From here it looks like every word he’s saying is funny; the beautiful Debbie Laney and Jennie Sudor laugh uncontrollably.
It’s noon and the kids’ August shadows fall directly on the warm gravel around their feet. But twenty feet away, just outside the playground, the weather is cold, rainy and gray. Because it’s always cold, rainy and gray around … “Lonely Guy.”
Where Lonely Guy walks there is perpetual November drizzle. The wind blows sad newspapers down the empty street and somewhere far off a dog barks.
Lonely Guy stays at the edges of things. He doesn’t join, but he wants you to know he’s not joining and so he orbits around the action just out of range. If Lonely Guy were to join the group, oh, the smart things he might say. Debbie and Jennie would at last see the flash of true wit, see the sunflare-glint on the knife edge of the perfectly placed word.
(Jennie giggles: “That was so funny and true, Lonely Guy. Would you mind if I jotted that down?”)
But he doesn’t go into the playground. He could. If he wanted to. But Lonely Guy has a lot on his mind lately and turns to walk away.
If Lonely Guy has a super-power, it happens here: when girls look at him, they see him walking in s l o w m o t i o n, or they should anyway, because in the movies walking in Slow Motion is very cool. Everything looks better in Slow Motion – especially Lonely Guy. If Debbie and Jennie would only glance over, they’d see the graceful poetry of his forward motion; not the clip-clip-clip cadence of ordinary pedestrians, but the slow pistons of his contemplative and determined stride.
As he moves out of sight around the corner, he imagines Debbie sees him from the corner of her eye and in the last second she calls from summer through fall to him, “Stop! Come back. Forever.” But he’s too far down the street now, into late November. He can’t hear her.
But that’s okay. The credits have begun to roll past and the music comes up: it’s the Beatles singing “This Boy.” And Lonely Guy walks in Slow Motion into the cold November dusk.
The Pagans pose in jackets for local menswear store.
From left: Jim Rushton, Jeff Sullivan, Kip Sullivan (sporting a black eye), Steve Rossi, and Jerry Huiting.
PAGAN RITES
The main juvenile officer in the Rochester Police Department was a man with the perfectly cast name of Dutch Link.
Dutch was the guy who sent the hoods upstate to the juve-y in Red Wing. He also had say over which bands were allowed to play in the police-sponsored mixers at the Armory. Dutch became acquainted with the Pagans in both capacities.
The Armory was the best steady gig in town and all the bands wanted to play there. But Dutch was no desk cop and knew all about the Pagans’ occasional drinking during performances. Kip remembers Dutch “calling us in a lot, but he never really busted on us. He was a pretty good guy.”
Dutch’s warnings were avuncular. Jeff remembers a big arm being thrown over his shoulder and a lesson in moral arithmetic: “Now Jeff, it’s like this. There’s nothin’ wrong with a motorcycle, right? And there’s nothin’ wrong with a motorcycle jacket, see? But when you put the two of ‘em together.... people might get the wrong idea and sort of, well, react poorly, if you take my meanin’.”
In The Flip Side: An Illustrated History of Southern Minnesota Rock & Roll, Dutch filled in the rest of the equation in a speech to all five band members: “There’s nothing wrong with calling yourselves the ‘Pagans’ and there’s nothing wrong with young men having a good time. But when you do what you boys do, well, people get the wrong idea.”
The Pagans liked giving people the wrong idea. So much so that when the organizers of John Marshall High School’s 20th reunion invited the Pagans to play one last nostalgic gig in 1985, they included a caveat: “You guys had a reputation as being rowdy drinkers back then. You’re not going to do that for this, are you?” As far as Kip and Jeff were concerned, Roger drank to exist; the Pagans drank to have fun and make trouble. But the fun came to a head on August 7th, 1965, at the Olmsted County Fair.
The men-with-short-haircuts had arranged another Battle of the Bands for the big Fair and the night began with a 6pm radio interview of the Pagans on Rochester’s KROC. Kip noted in his diary the band was in fine Beatle form: “All of us talking at once, giving wise answers.” The Pagans had sailed through the prelims in the afternoon and had several hours to kill before finals at 8pm. Kip’s diary continues: “Went out on empty road by Plunkett’s, boozed. God, did it ever hit me.”
By the time the Pagans assembled back at the County Fair, everyone realized there was no way Kip would be able to perform. They poured him back into the VW bus and drove out to the Zumbro River. They stripped off his clothes and pushed him into the cold water.
Jeff, interviewed in “The Flip Side,” 1991
I can still see Kip’s naked white body tumbling through brambles and down the muddy slopes into about a foot and a half of water. Kip had a riot, standing there throwing water into the air, naked with his sunglasses still on. We finally got him out of the water and dressed. Behind the stage tent, we started pumping boiling coffee into him to the point where we actually burned his mouth.
It finally came our turn to take the stage in front of a crowd of around 500. Kip still couldn’t even stand up, so we found a little stool backstage for him and brought it out front. We started our set doing all of the songs that Jerry and Steve sang lead on, until it came to the point where Kip had to sing. [It was] quite a sight to see, Kip sitting there on his little stool behind the mike, sunglasses on, wet hair hanging in his eyes, in a clinging wet shirt. I don’t recall exactly which song it was [Rossi says it was “Dizzy Miss Lizzy”] but Kip had just completed singing the same verse twice in a row, completely screwing up the words.
As it came time for Jerry’s lead, Kip leaned back on his stool and the whole thing went over – Kip, the stool, and the amplifier behind him. It’s hard to describe what live amplifiers with reverb springs sound like when they’re falling off of bandstands. On his way down, Kip’s head hit Steve’s boom, making the boom swing around in two big circles and Steve had to duck behind his drums as it crossed over him. There were amplifiers crashing all around and in the middle of all this chaos, there was Kip lying amidst a tangle of wires and amps with his guitar half on, looking very confused. The audience went absolutely berserk. People were jumping up and down and screaming for more.
* * *
Phone calls about the incident made their way to the Millstone and Roger’s response was to ground his oldest son “until college” and lay into Myra for being such a poor mother. His drinking increased and then, the same weekend the Beatles played Shea Stadium in New York City and the riots burned in Watts, life in Rochester hit a new low.
Kip’s diary, August 15, 1965
Tomorrow is my birthday. Oh yay. [Sad face drawn in the diary.] It’s a long story. After the band practiced, we went to the liquor store where Rossi managed to buy three 6-packs of Grain Belt. Jim and I went to drink with Eddie P. Had to be in by 10:00 so the band just came back to my house to drink. I announced our arrival home to Dad, then we walked way down to the back yard and drank and talked. 10 minutes later Dad came down with fla
shlight. “What’s going on, boys?”
He sat down beside me. I held up my beer and asked if he wanted a swig. He started bitching, “You boys get on home. Get going.” He said to me, “Get in the house.” I go, “Have to finish my beer.” He swung at my beer and knocked it away, yelling, “Get in the house!” I said, “You wanna polish it off?” He says, “Wise guy.” “You’re a nosey old bastard.” “What’d you call me?” “A nosey old bastard.” He swung, said I was a “spoiled shit.” I backed down the hill.
He ran down, swung at me again with the big flashlight, I ducked, and put one in his paunch. As he went down, he pulled me on top. I just put my head in his chest and wailed about five blows in his face; I only got my ears boxed. We separated. He said, “Get in the house!” but I just walked back up to driveway. I heard “Get in the house!” again but I headed for the front gate where Eddie’s car was parked. Mom came out and asked, “Is he drunk again?” I just got in car, took off, finished the beer, went to Eddie’s, watched TV and slept.
The next morning Dad came to the breakfast table with bruises on his face and there was no looking away. When the elevator doors opened on the 6th floor of the Mayo Clinic, everyone could see the doctor needed to be in a hospital, not work in one.
EYE OF THE HURRICANE
Most chemical dependency counselors will tell you no alcoholic voluntarily submits to accepting help – they simply run out of options. Old-timers in A.A. often say the door to their meeting rooms ought to be just one foot high. “Like those dog doors,” one member told me, “because that’s how most of us came to our first meeting – crawling on our hands and knees, completely humbled.”
Whatever made our father finally decide to accept help we’ll never know. Perhaps he woke up that next morning, saw his black eye in the mirror, and knew he wouldn’t be able to explain it at work. By then, it was no secret his boss Dr. Coventry was losing his patience.
“People were talking to me about smelling alcohol on his breath during working hours,” Coventry told me during our interview in Rochester. “He finally admitted he had a serious problem. But by that time it had gone beyond me to the Board of Governors and they recommended he go to the Institute of Living in Hartford. Roger could not go on the way he was.”
With the news of Dad’s impending hospitalization, we felt the eye of the hurricane move over the Millstone. In the sudden quiet we shared what little information we had; even Kip was unsure, recording in his diary, “Dad in sorrowful mood. Told me he planned to fly to Philadelphia Institute Of Living (or is it Hartford?) at 4:00 this afternoon. Can’t quite believe it. No one seems to know how long he’ll be gone. Estimates run from 2 months to 2 years.”
Like the weekend runs we’d taken in our motel hideaways, this too happened fast but now it was Dad leaving the Millstone, not us. There he was, standing in the hallway holding a suitcase and suddenly we were being called to come tell him goodbye. Jeff was going to drive him to the airport and remembers waiting for Dad in the car out in driveway. “The top of the MG was down. Dad got into the passenger seat and as he closed the door Mom appeared out of nowhere and gave him a very affectionate but reserved series of strokes on his head. She said something like ‘Good luck.’ Dad didn’t look up. He muttered something I recall along the lines of ‘You don’t care.’ He looked like he was going to cry. He didn’t. But on the way back from the airport, I did.”
The next morning, the first of many hopeful letters from Florida arrived in the mail.
Grandpa’s letters, August 21, 1965
Dear Daughter: These pages I suppose you will prefer to tear out and dispose of, inasmuch as these Blue Books are bound into volumes for purposes of family history. But I can hardly write without some comment on the great significance of what happened yesterday. I judge that your strength (which I marvel at) must have been taxed almost to the limit.
Today all we do is think of you and pray for your deliverance from a tragic situation – you and the boys. What seemed so auspicious and happy in 1944 has become a sad business indeed. We turn over in our minds this development and wonder why and how. At the same time, we deplore our helplessness. There is nothing we can do. Our one and only daughter is in deep trouble and her parents cannot help her.
I am not sure whether this Steinhilber is your attorney, or friend or the psychiatrist but I shudder at the necessity of his advice to be alert for violence. I telephoned your friend Tony Bianco about that (when you first revealed the situation) and he assured me that the gun was not available to CRS. [When Grandpa was mad at Roger, he referred to him by initials.]
Of course, he could buy another. I cannot escape the fervent hope that none of you will ever see him again. It does worry me that he might leave Hartford and suddenly appear at the ‘Stone. It is my judgment you should change the locks on all doors. Your mother agrees with me on this.
We believe the crisis has passed and your success is a good one. But I confess to continued disquietude. I do hope that CRS’s absence is long-continued and that this will bring some surcease to you, battered and bruised as you must be. How dear you are to our hearts.
May God bless you and your boys.
The Millstone
NO HELP FROM GOD
For decades alcoholism was considered a lack of willpower at best, a moral failing at worst. It wasn’t until 1966 it was even classified a disease by the American Medical Association, and even then treatments for addiction were medieval: electro-shock therapy, insulin shock, heavy sedation.
That this was in fact the kind of treatment my father was about to receive in Hartford is no dishonor to the doctors there; it was simply the best medical thinking of the times. Western medicine loves to cure stuff, but alcoholism can’t be cured, only arrested.
No matter how many needles doctors stuck in their drunks, or how many Rorschach ink blots they showed them, upon dismissal most of their patients gave them a cheerful thumbs-up, walked out of the hospital and into a bar across the street.
As the doctors scratched their heads over their patients’ continued drinking, strange meetings were being called to order in basements of churches everywhere. Gathering to sit in the uncomfortable folding chairs were some serious Grade-A Losers – booze hounds, smack heads, pill gobblers – men, women, a Noah’s Ark of Dysfunction, all of them swilling horrible church basement coffee and smoking way too much. Hardly any of them had ever spent a Sunday sitting upstairs in the regular church. God had never offered much to this crowd; religion, next to nothing.
“Religion is for people who want to avoid hell,” one A.A. old-timer told me. “Spirituality is for people who’ve already been there.”
Sitting happily here in the folding chairs of Alcoholics Anonymous, people who’d completely rejected the church or had simply never believed in God were discovering a new form of spirituality. Like the good Christians upstairs, they too were lowering their heads and praying – but to whom or to what, it didn’t matter.
“As long as it’s something bigger than you,” they were told.
Down here in the basements of A.A., it didn’t matter what your higher power was. It could be the power of group, The 12 Steps on the wall, good ol’ God, or the divine luminous being at the center of your personal Buddha. Fine with them if you thought the Bible was bullshit or if your ass hadn’t warmed a church pew in decades. What mattered down here was humility and surrender. What mattered down here was admitting that you, by yourself, were completely unable to beat your addiction. What mattered was developing a willingness – that’s all, just a willingness – to believe that something outside of your excellent self might be able to save you from the insanity of your excellent self. And absolutely any higher power would do.
One veteran, sober for 35 years, recalls arguing about “all this higher power crap” with his first A.A. sponsor, a man named Bennie.
“I told Bennie, told ‘im, I don’t believe in God.
And Bennie says, ‘That’s fine, I do, so you just go ahead and pray
to Bennie’s God. That’s right. Just put your hands together like so and say, ‘Dear Bennie’s God, I seem to need some help gettin’ my sorry ass out of this deep pile of shit I’ve put myself in.’”
“I know, I know,” the old-timer shrugs. “But ... Bennie was right.”
These people didn’t care about religion. It was all about getting out of yourself, about a willingness to believe that something out there could restore you to sanity.
In fact, whenever the word God was used in A.A. they went out of their way to clarify this higher power was “God as we understood him.” They even underlined this phrase in all their literature.
Unfortunately, Roger Sullivan had never heard of Bennie’s God. God – as Roger understood him – was Irene’s God and He was fucking scary.
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